A Man Without Breath

I walked over to Krivyenko’s motionless body and pushed it with the toecap of my boot. The man was without breath and there was so much blood on the floor that I hardly needed to bend down and look for a pulse, although it would have been easy enough to have taken hold of his wrist. It was curious the way he had fallen on his face, with one of his hands slightly behind his back, almost as if it had been tied there. Death had been caused by a single shot in the head. The bullet had struck the man just above the nape of his neck, piercing the occipital bone, close to the lower part of the skull; the point of exit was in the lower part of the forehead. The shot had been fired from a German-made pistol with a capacity of less than eight millimetres. The shot in the victim’s head looked as if it had been the work of an experienced man. I thought it much more than likely that the body would end up in a shallow grave – unmarked and unmourned.

‘Curious, but it seems as if you’re not to have your witness to the Katyn massacre after all, Bernie,’ said Von Gersdorff.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not. But perhaps, in a very small way, the dead have had some justice.’